Day of the False King (21 page)

“Kem-weset will know what to do.”

It was some time later when they found the
house where Kem-weset lived. It took all of Semerket’s strength to
climb the three stories to the physician’s apartment. To his surprise,
a young woman opened the door. Wrapped in a thin blanket, she carried
an oil lamp in her hand. Her dark eyes widened in fear when she saw
him, and her shrill scream filled the stairwell.

“Kemi!” she cried in Egyptian. “Kemi, come
quickly!”

In the flickering lamplight, Semerket looked
down and comprehended the reason for her fright: blood saturated his
robe’s pleated bosom. The sight made Semerket feel suddenly faint, and
he had to push his way past her to grasp the back of a rickety chair,
weaving uncertainly.

The physician was in the sleeping room,
fastening a robe about himself. He did not seem in the least abashed
about the young woman. Though Semerket had feared the old man might be
bleary from drink, the moment Kem-weset saw the wound on his neck his
physician’s eye hardened in professional appraisal.

“I thought you meant to come to me only for
headaches,” he said with a slight smile. Then he spoke softly to the
young woman. “Dearest, my medicine chest, please.”

Casting a stricken glance at Semerket, the
young woman slipped from the room. Kem-weset sat Semerket in the chair,
and looked at his throat.

“My attacker,” Semerket said, “he’s
downstairs. Punctured lung, I think.”

“So you’re diagnosing now?” Kem-weset took
Semerket’s chin in his hand and pushed his head slowly from side to
side. Semerket winced, expecting pain, but there was none.

The young woman emerged from the other room,
lugging a cedar box. Kem-weset unlatched the casket’s top and eyed the
jumble of vials and bottles. He removed a small clay jug and unplugged
its stopper. The sharp scent of juniper spirits jabbed Semerket’s
nostrils.

“A cloth, please, my child.”

The woman bent to retrieve a piece of folded
linen from the chest.

“A few drops of this on it, I think,” he
told her, handing her the tiny jug.

The physician began to clean the wound
quickly. As he worked, he made the introductions. “Sitamun,” he said,
“meet Semerket, a special envoy from our own dear pharaoh. And a man
with enemies, I think.”

Sitamun bobbed her head shyly.

“Your nurse?” Semerket murmured.

Kem-weset coughed, and explained, “I removed
a few disfiguring moles from her bottom a few weeks ago. Sitamun repays
me in her own way.”

“Kem-weset is the finest physician in all
Babylonia,” the woman said reverently, gazing at the old physician.

“A bowl of wine, please, Sitamun,” Kem-weset
directed. As the girl poured, Kem-weset quickly wrote out a prayer on a
strip of papyrus in red ink. He placed the bowl of wine on the floor in
front of him, and dipped the papyrus into the bowl. As the glyphs
gradually dissolved into the liquid, Kem-weset added to it a few
tinctures of some foul-smelling elixir. He handed the bowl to Semerket.

“You know I don’t drink wine —”

“You’ll drink this.”

Semerket gulped it rapidly, hoping the
wine’s taste would not linger on his tongue to torment him. As it
reached his belly, he felt its warm, familiar glow radiating into all
his limbs. It felt very pleasant…too pleasant.

“Your wound,” pronounced Kem-weset, “is only
a superficial puncture, nothing more.”

“Superficial?” Semerket said, incensed. “The
man tried to cut my throat!”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but it wasn’t even
made with a knife.”

Semerket was incredulous. “What cut me,
then?”

“This is the culprit.” Kem-weset pointed to
the falcon badge on Semerket’s chest. “The tip of this wing, here — it
somehow got wedged into your neck and probably nicked a vessel. See
there, how it’s bent? How the blood has caked on it?”

Semerket lifted the pectoral from around his
head. He held the badge up to the oil lamp. There, scoring the gold,
was the jagged gouge where the assassin’s blade had scraped across the
wing, futilely seeking the flesh beneath.

Semerket swallowed, inhaling raggedly. “The
gods were protecting me tonight,” he said.

Kem-weset fashioned a poultice of honey and
herbs, and pressed it to the wound, then tied it around Semerket’s neck
with light gauze. The physician leaned back on his heels, satisfied.
“Now to your attacker,” he announced. “Outside, you said?”

“In the stairwell with —” Semerket
hesitated. He had never bothered to learn the names of his two Dark
Head spies. “With my friends.”

During the time Kem-weset was gone, Semerket
asked Sitamun for some water and a sponge. As she fetched it, Semerket
removed his once-fine palace robe, peeling away its sticky, reddened
layers. Sitamun brought him a jug, and he began to wash himself.

He was presentable by the time Kem-weset
opened the door. The two Dark Heads staggered into the dim light
half-carrying, half-dragging his attacker. At Kem-weset’s command, they
laid the man on the floor next to the medicine chest. The assassin’s
eyes were closed and the old physician felt for a pulse. Not finding
one, he deliberately gouged the man’s right eye with his thumb. There
was no response.

“I’m afraid he’s gone, Semerket,” Kem-weset
said simply.

Semerket muttered a foul word.

Kem-weset brought the oil lamp close to the
man’s face. The assassin was bearded, precluding any possibility that
he might be Egyptian. In fact, he did not even seem to be Babylonian,
for he was of a slender build and his long hair was braided, tied off
at the ends with amber beads.

“Is he an Elamite?” asked Semerket.

“No, he’s from the mountains to the
northeast of Elam,” said the wheezing Dark Head. “That’s how they dress
their hair.”

On a sudden impulse, Semerket reached
forward to open the assassin’s eye. Its color was pale silver — like
Queen Narunte’s eyes. A shiver ran down his spine. Had she sent this
man against him that evening to prevent the rescue of her despised
sister-in-law? He immediately dismissed the thought as being too
farfetched. In her drunken state, the queen would have been incapable
of arranging anything, much less the assassination of a foreign
dignitary so recently employed by her husband.

“But I know this man!” Kem-weset said
suddenly. “I’m almost sure of it!” He handed the lamp to Sitamun, and
then withdrew a lancet from his medicine chest. He cut at the man’s
sleeve, tearing the cloth up to the elbow. A long and vivid scar,
crosshatched with stitch marks, ran down the man’s forearm.

Kem-weset nodded. “That’s my work there. He
and six others came to me one night, all bruised and bloodied. They’d
been in a tavern brawl, they said. I remember thinking at the time that
their story wasn’t true.”

“Why?” Semerket asked.

“Because they were all stinking of soot and
fire. There’d been no fire in Babylon that night and no brawl, either.”

Semerket blinked. “When did this happen?” he
asked the physician.

“Some weeks ago. Early winter. Just about
the time you say your wife disappeared…” Kem-weset’s voice trailed off.
He shot a stricken glance at Semerket.

“Were the other men you treated from the
mountains as well?” Semerket breathed.

“No, they were Dark Heads. At least, they
were dressed like Dark Heads.” Kem-weset’s voice was uncertain.

“You doubt it?”

Kem-weset reluctantly nodded.

“Why?”

“Because they spoke an excellent Egyptian.”

SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN, Semerket
and his Dark Head spies took the assassin’s body to a nearby canal.
Semerket, clad in an old tunic borrowed from Kem-weset, watched as the
two noiselessly rolled the corpse into the water.

Semerket was almost certain the man had been
at the Elamite plantation the night of the raid, and he deeply
regretted being unable to force a confession from him. If the man had
indeed been one of the raiders, it would go a long way to bolster the
Isins’ claims that they had nothing to do with the crime. Then, too,
this man’s companions had spoken “an excellent Egyptian,” as Kem-weset
purported. Had they been armed with Egyptian arrows, as well? Semerket
wondered.

Semerket forced down a sudden surge of rage.
This man, now sinking beneath the canal’s surface, might be the same
one he had seen so often in his nightmares, who had stood exultant over
Naia’s fallen body.

“If only you could die twice…” he muttered
to the corpse.

In the dark, he felt a slight gust of warm
air from the east, the harbinger of dawn. He looked at his two
companions in the silvering light, whose names he had finally learned —
they were the brothers Galzu and Kuri.

“Tell me,” he whispered to them, “how did
you know I was in trouble tonight? Why did you show up just when I
needed you?”

“That’s very simple, lord,” Kuri, the thin
one, said almost blithely. “We knew you’d need us sooner or later, at
the rate you were going, so we kept you always in sight. We hoped to
prove our worthiness to you.”

The explanation, glib as it was, made sense.
The two Dark Heads had indeed saved his life — and one does not
question too closely a gift from the gods.

“All right,” Semerket said at last, though
halfheartedly. “I’ll continue paying you.”

“A wise decision, lord,” Galzu said, rubbing
his fat hands together gleefully. “You will have no regrets.”

Semerket eyes were flinty. “You don’t know
what I want you to do, yet.”

Galzu spoke with supreme confidence, “Of
course we do, my lord. You want us to continue what we’ve been doing
all along. We will watch over you.”

“But this, too, you must know — they’ve
attempted to kill me once and when they find out they’ve failed,
they’ll do it again. In a way it’s good news; it means I’m onto
something they don’t want me to know. All I have to do is figure out
what it is. Next time, though, I want them alive. Understand?”

Solemnly, the two Dark Heads promised him
that they would do as he wished. To ensure it, he filled their fists
with pieces of Pharaoh’s gold. Murmuring their joyous thanks, they left
him at the canal to take up their positions in the shadows.

The scent of dung fires lightly stung
Semerket’s nostrils. Another day had begun in Babylon, and the indigo
sky was turning crimson. Resolutely, Semerket brought his tunic up
around his neck, hiding his bandage, and went down the nearby alley.

“YOU MUST STOP telling people
you’re my wife,” he said.

Semerket was in the little courtyard of the
Egyptian temple, seated beside Aneku. Hearing him, she hugged her arms
around her knees and her sigh was a hollow sound of longing and
wistfulness.

“Am I so hideous to you that you could not
be married to me, even in pretense?”

Semerket knew if he answered that question,
he would end up having to meticulously list Aneku’s charms, if only to
reassure her that she was not ugly or repellent — something she knew
well enough on her own. Why must women always be told such things, he
asked himself with rising irritation. Seeking to divert her, he
gestured to the forecourt.

“I’ve never seen this place so clean. Wia
must be grateful to have you here.”

“She hates me.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t,” Semerket said
without conviction.

Aneku’s mouth twisted into a wry smile, and
a spark of mischief lighted her eye. “It doesn’t matter. I like the way
she scolds me; it reminds me of my mother. ‘Just a wild girl who’ll
come to no good!’ she used to say.” Aneku’s fleeting cheer deserted
her, and her slanted green eyes grew bleak. “She was right about that.”

“Was she?” Semerket replied carefully. “Is
it your wildness that brought you here, then?”

“Are you finally asking me why I was
banished from Egypt?” Aneku asked archly.

“Only if you want to tell me.”

“I was banished because I dared to love
someone above me.”

It was not the answer that Semerket
expected, and he looked at her with frank curiosity.

“He was a noble,” she explained. “And I was
only a serving maid in a tavern. Every night he came to see me. We fell
in love. As soon as he could divorce his wife, he promised, we were
going to break the jar together. I didn’t know at the time that his
brother-in-law was Menef.”

Semerket blinked. “Menef? The ambassador?”

“Yes, Menef — who had me hauled into court
on charges of adultery so that his sister’s reputation remained
unsullied. A few bribes later I was named an adulteress and banished
from Egypt.”

“But if your lover was so high up, surely he
could have forbidden the trial?”

“Menef threatened him with exposure and he
didn’t dare.”

Semerket shook his head in confusion.
“Exposure of what? Adultery’s not exactly an unknown sin in lordly
circles.”

“It was something else. I don’t know what.
But Menef knew about it and once my trial began, I never saw him
again.” She looked away, pulling a withered leaf from the fig tree
beside her. “Naia knew the man, you know. He’d been a friend of her
husband.”

Semerket’s black eyes grew wide. “Nakht was
your lover’s friend?
Nakht?
Well, then, I can tell you
exactly what your lover was involved in, what he didn’t want exposed —
the conspiracy to kill Pharaoh Ramses, that’s what! No wonder he feared
Menef.”

“No,” Aneku said firmly. “You’re mistaken.
He wouldn’t have been involved in anything like that. He was a good
man.”

Semerket made a dismissive gesture,
heartless. “You’re lucky you escaped him. Your marriage would have been
cursed. Egypt was brought near to ruin because of ‘good men’ just like
him.”

Her slanted green eyes hardened into
emeralds.
“Egypt?
Don’t talk to me of Egypt — Egypt can sink!
What did it ever do for me except destroy everything I ever wanted, and
then throw me out in the bargain? I’m fed up with Egyptian hypocrisy —
and you’re the worst, Semerket! So fine, so upstanding, Pharaoh’s
‘special envoy’ chasing after a dead woman —”